I'm listening to a presentation on a gigantic housing grant my city is applying for. (PRO Grant from HUD, if you're familiar). They're proposing spending millions on regulatory reform to promote missing middle housing, which, ok fine, that's a big task in a major city, but that should already have been done in 2023. Other money would go towards vague stuff like an accelerator program for bipoc affordable developers. After all of that, they're proposing only 120 "deeply affordable" (under 30% ami) units with the grant.
We have a shortfall of tens of thousands of those units in our city, and this multimillion dollar federal grant would fund just 120.
JUST FUCKING BUILD PUBLIC HOUSING CO-OPS
I swear the neoliberal public-private partnership brainworms these people have is beyond terminal. "We have to strategically leverage this potential pot of funding" no you fucking don't
The 'supply side' answers to this problem are completely empty platitudes. Developers will continue to tell us that building more units will drive down prices but we also need laws that these need to be kept at a certain price and must be filled with people who need housing.
In so many major cities, these luxury units are being built while sitting unoccupied. Does not help anyone
BC we know how much landlords enjoy lowering rent when faced with reality